Judy Cassab, the Australian painter, two time winner of the Archibald portrait prize and Holocaust survivor has died in Sydney at the age of 95.

Cassab was born in Vienna to Hungarian parents and met her future husband estate manager Jancsi Kampfner in 1938. In a 2009 interview with Fairfax, Cassab’s son John Seed said although his father was 18 years her senior – double his mother’s age when they met – “their life had been an intense love affair”.

The wealthy Jewish couple’s charmed life was disrupted by war, with periods spent in labour camps, hiding underground and assuming false identities. In Budapest they had two children, Janos (who would later change his name to John Seed) and Peter, before leaving Europe for Sydney.

Seed said his mother “had a shocking early life, living through the Nazis and the second world war, experiencing horrendous events and the death of all her family. But she never played the victim, or hated.”

The family emigrated to Sydney in 1951, where Cassab would continue her painting career, quickly attracting national fame. High profile commissions included portraits of opera singer Joan Sutherland, dancer Robert Helpmann, Margaret Whitlam (wife to former prime minister Gough Whitlam), pioneering pilot Nancy Bird-Walton and media magnates Frank Packer and Warwick Fairfax.

In 1967 with her portrait of artist Margo Lewers, she became the first woman to win the Archibald prize twice, having already won in 1960 for her portrait of another artist, Stanislav Rapotec. She has been an Archibald finalist over 40 times.

This year she became the subject of an Archibald prize finalist, sitting for painter Filippa Buttitta who said she read Cassab’s award-winning diaries and discovered they shared in common an early love of art-making by drawing portraits of family members.

Cassab became a commander of the order of the British Empire in 1969, then an officer of the Order of Australia in 1988. A 2013 retrospective exhibition included 100 of her works. She had already donated 400 pieces to galleries around Australia and was no longer painting due to declining health, moving into a nursing home last year.